The men were doing well. He estimated twelve to fifteen rounds a minute, at the least, and considerably more accurate with their aim than their German opponents, even given that the Germans were exposed and moving. He crushed the thought that he, too, might have to shoot soon. He’d never killed a man. He’d never intended to. He only hoped he could manage it if the need arose.
As Gabriel watched, Cawley and Lyton each fired a final round from their advance placement, then abandoned the wagon’s inadequate cover and retreated for the barricades. Cawley went down, his body jerking with the impact of two, then three bullets.
Gabriel closed his eyes for a moment, but the picture was the same when he opened them, Cawley sprawled amid the lush grass and wildflowers like a painting, bright and unreal. He didn’t move again. Lyton didn’t see, and a moment later was dragged behind a heap of sofas and thrust into a trench.
Smith and his platoon edged their way along the other side of the road. He could see Smith’s fevered grin even at this distance, Figgis close by his shoulder with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Gabriel eased himself onto his elbows and tried to spot Wilks or Hailey, to let them know they had somewhere to retreat. Someone touched his elbow, and he rolled, pistol ready. Ashby halted his movement with a hand on his wrist, and Gabriel let his breath free in a rush. Trust Ashby to move like a ghost. Ashby said, loudly enough to be heard over the rifles, “You’re to hold this position.”
Ashby’s usually insouciant expression had tightened, his mouth drawn into a thin line, his face caked with dust and sweat beneath the brim of his cap. A red line streaked across his neck, the blood already crusting. He’d come within inches of being killed already. His throat too tight for words, Gabriel could only nod.
Ashby grinned at him and gripped the back of his neck for a moment, a comforting squeeze that conveyed fresh energy. Then he scrambled down the road. Gabriel worked his way back to the cemetery wall and relayed their orders, then returned to his vantage point. A couple of Germans had fought free of the chaos at the foot of the bridge and were advancing at a run, bayonets leveled. Gabriel couldn’t hear individual shots amid the percussive storm of them, but the two interlopers jerked to a halt and landed short of Cawley’s body. Southey and Mason, he realized, peering up at the spire. Sure enough, he could just see the tip of a rifle protruding from the narrow arras.
He spotted Hailey, small and slender, darting across a small stretch of open ground to speak urgently to Smith. Smith and his platoon fanned out behind the barricades as three more Germans clambered over corpses and hit the bank. Someone behind them had the bright idea to drag the bodies out of the way and shove them into the cover afforded by the bridge’s arch. Two of those men were shot, then another, who collapsed into the water and thrashed amid a further spatter of bullets. Hailey dashed back to a clump of willows, and Gabriel finally glimpsed a hint of Hammerhead’s coppery flank and swishing tail through the greenery. Wilks was too close to the action; he ought to fall back to Gabriel’s position, at the least. He hoped Ashby had presented this advice. Wilks liked to be in the midst of everything, but sometimes he would listen to Ashby.
As if he’d heard Gabriel’s thoughts, Wilks’s wide shoulders poked free of cover, then he set off at a jog for the rear area. Gabriel’s relieved breath caught when Wilks’s hunched-over form froze. An endless moment later, he collapsed to his knees, then forward.
Hailey burst from the trees, heedless of danger, still grasping Hammerhead’s reins. He fell to his knees beside Wilks, struggling to turn him over. Even from this distance, Gabriel could see bright blood rapidly soaking the front of Wilks’s tunic as his heart pumped too much, too fast, like one of those horrid dreams in which one could see and see but not touch or interfere. Hailey struggled to lift the captain’s immense form onto Hammerhead, but wasn’t nearly strong enough, and Gabriel could tell it wouldn’t matter anyway. Ashby skidded into sight then, grabbing Hailey and heaving his small form onto the horse instead, then dragging the horse and running for cover, back toward Gabriel and the church.
Gabriel yelled for someone to provide cover. Ashby sprinted toward them while Hailey scrambled for a grip on Hammerhead’s saddle and neck. Gabriel waved them toward the cemetery; Ashby vaulted the low wall and Hammerhead neatly popped over it behind him, narrowly missing a headstone.
Hailey yelled incoherently as he tumbled to the ground; his arms were stained red to the elbows. Ashby swept him into a tight embrace, Hailey’s flailing hand leaving a smear of blood down his cheek. Ashby firmly kissed the top of the boy’s head and looked over him at Gabriel, and the anxious cluster of his platoon. “Wilks is dead,” he said. Hailey burst into sobs, and Ashby clutched him more tightly, rubbing a hand up and down his back, but otherwise continuing as if nothing had happened. “We’re going to be overrun shortly. I’m going to have Daglish take his platoon and fade back to this position. Smith will follow. We’ll pick off as many as we can, to make it look like we’ve still men behind the barricades. Then we’re getting the hell down the road as soon as it’s dark, quick as we can.”
The next hours were a blur of action, retreat and more action. Skuce was killed. Pittfield, Mason and Evans were all wounded but still mobile, and Figgis shot through both legs. Corporal Joyce rigged a sling between two men so he could be carried. Later, if they could find poles and had the leisure, they could build a stretcher for Hammerhead to pull behind him.
Once darkness fell, the shooting slowed to an occasional crack. Gabriel was shocked that the Germans seemed to be halting for the night, though if they’d had as little rest and food as his own men, he shouldn’t be surprised. As soon as he judged it safest, Ashby got them moving, chivying them along like sheep until they reached the cover of the next hamlet down the road. Wisely, its inhabitants had already fled before the German onslaught.
Gabriel entered another church, a much smaller and humbler one than before, when he and Lieutenant Daglish were assigned to fortify the building as best they could. They worked in companionable silence, then split the abandoned communion loaves among the men and allowed them to sleep, some for the first time in nearly twenty hours.
A bicycle messenger found them four hours later with new orders. This line of defense was being strategically readjusted. They must make all speed. Again.
Gabriel spent the next hours running and rerunning the melody line of his adagio in the back of his mind, while at the same time periodically counting his platoon to make sure no one had fallen behind. He had to continually remind himself not to look for Cawley. Ten hours later, as they dug yet another hasty line of scratch trenches for the rearguard to occupy, he was too hungry and exhausted to create. His mind disconcerted him by playing through an obscure work by Salamone Rossi he’d learned in his conservatory days. Twenty hours after that, even his vast musical memory had failed him, and he was reduced to hearing an endless repetition of a single phrase of a cello exercise. He thought he might claw his own skull open to make it stop.
He lost count of the trenches they dug, both his platoon and Daglish’s switching off with Ashby’s and Smith’s. His service dress was stiff with dirt all down the back, and he blistered his hands helping dig, because no man’s hands could be wasted when the aim was to get the army away from the German onslaught intact. No one had any rations left, and there was no one left in the army’s path to sell them any.
Ashby sent the company, a few men at a time, foraging into every field of corn or orchard they passed, but an apple wasn’t much to sustain a man through a day of marching in full kit, stopping only to dig and snatch brief naps while sitting upright. Worse, they had to be sparing with their canteens, for without the cavalry scouts who were otherwise occupied, no one knew where water could be found, and when they could be refilled. Gabriel could only imagine what all this was like for the men, who carried considerably more kit than he did, and some of them wearing stiff new boots.
To top it all off, after forty-eight hours their progre
ss slowed to a hobble when their portion of the battalion caught up to the army of refugees, the former inhabitants of villages and hamlets who’d originally welcomed them as saviors. Now they were less happy. The British, their words and gestures indicated, belonged between them and the advancing Germans. Else what good were they? Daglish tried to explain strategic retirement to one vituperative old woman via sign language; Gabriel had to drag him away by the elbow, and then haul him off the road and out of sight when the younger man argued, then briefly wept in exhausted frustration.
Gabriel kept hold of Daglish’s forearm with one hand and fished for his handkerchief with the other. “Here, wipe your face,” he said. “You can’t let the men see you like this.”
“Bloody Goddamn fucking hell,” Daglish said, pressing the linen to his eyes. He blew his nose, leaving a smear of sweaty dust on the cloth, then sucked in a breath and blew it out. “My feet are bleeding.”
Gabriel patted his shoulder, wishing he had someone to pat his, or better still, massage his aching lower back and swollen feet. He took his hand away before manly comfort changed into something else. “Mine, too. At least we’re not carrying sixty-odd pounds of kit. All right now?”
Daglish looked over his shoulder at a field of turnips, currently being trampled by fleeing refugees and their assorted wagons and prams and dogcarts. “No, but I’ll keep on.” His eyes met Gabriel’s. “Thank you. I mean it.”
“Good man.” Meyer clapped his shoulder, as Ashby would have done. “Let’s catch them up.”
The British Expeditionary Force might have prevented the Germans from invading France, but Gabriel did not consider it a promising beginning to the war.
INTERLUDE
THE BILLET WASN’T BAD. NOEL, AS THE NEW COMMANDING officer, and Hailey were assigned what had once been the master bedroom of a prosperous banker, with more of the men bedding down in the parlor, study, garage and emptied wine cellar. Hailey set down three small kits atop a polished bureau and began fussing with their contents, his back to Noel. One of the kits had belonged to Captain Wilks.
The bed linens smelt overwhelmingly of cedar, mingling with the rich lemon oil–beeswax odor of furniture polish, incongruously clean and fresh layered upon the thick layers of their own sweat and horse and dust and gunpowder. Noel could also still smell blood, Wilks’s blood, soaked and dried into Hailey’s uniform tunic. He could practically smell the miasmic grief hanging over Hailey’s small form, as well. Left to his own devices, he would have crossed the room and once again taken Hailey into his arms, as if he were a relative.
Such things were frowned upon in His Majesty’s army. Instead, he wandered over to the long window and thrust aside the heavy drapes, letting the last sunbeams filter into the room. He could at least give Hailey some privacy, usually in short supply. Hailey might appreciate that more than anything else. “Does this place have modern plumbing?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Do you want a bath, sir?”
Noel gazed out the window, at a rolling green lawn now scored by military boots. His Majesty’s officers did not run outside and roll in the grass, either. “I think you’d better go first. Get that blood off you. Take your time, I won’t be back until you’re done. Requisition some kit out of these wardrobes to wear until your tunic dries.”
“Sir.” The word was choked.
“I’ve got to have the standard chat with the rest of the men downstairs. You can come down when you’re ready.”
“Sir.”
“And leave me some hot water, will you? Go on, now. Leave all that for later. I’ll help you decide what we should keep of Wilks’s things.” Without waiting for an answer, Noel left the room and trotted down the carpeted staircase. Men sprawled everywhere, packs for pillows, several snoring, Lieutenant Smith among them. Seeing him, Sergeant Pittfield scrambled to his feet, but Noel waved him back down. “Just wake them up for me. Gently, now.”
He hadn’t planned on being a captain, or even acting as one, quite so soon. His mother would be impressed. His father would be convinced Noel had moved up through superior innate ability instead of Wilks’s being caught by a bullet.
Pipes groaned and gurgled. Hailey was being sensible. Noel said to the array of filthy, unshaven, exhausted faces, “We’ll have a watch, two and two. The rest of you, sleep. You’ve more than earned it.”
Meyer found him afterward and glanced at the ceiling, their private code for outside. They walked a short distance in silence before he said, “Is Hailey all right?”
“Will be,” Noel said. He considered saying something else about Hailey, then changed his mind. “Anyone else? You?”
“Fine. Daglish had a moment or two. He’s fine now. Smith’s enjoying himself.”
“Vicious little bastard,” Noel said without heat. “A vicar’s son, too.”
“I wanted to say…” Meyer’s pale skin had always flushed easily. “You were right about Jemima.”
Hearing her name here, after all they’d experienced, was surreal. “I shouldn’t have said the things I did.”
Meyer clasped his hands behind his back. “You never said an untrue word about her, not once.”
That was true, but it wasn’t what mattered, not really. What mattered was that he’d been secretly jealous, not of Jemima, but of the children she would eventually give to her husband, and that had led him to be cruel to his closest friend. Noel asked, “Did you love her, Gabriel?”
He didn’t look away when he said, “No.”
It wasn’t fair that Meyer should be so alone. Noel tried not to put himself in Meyer’s place, and failed miserably. “I’m sorry. Truly I am.”
Meyer looked uncomfortable. “Thanks. I—I felt a bit guilty sometimes. Knowing I’d found someone, when it was you who really wanted to marry.”
“You’ll find someone else. Someone who loves you.” I will find someone. Someone like me, who will stay with me and bear my children.
“Enough, all right?” Meyer cuffed him. Noel feinted in return, tried to grab his shoulder and failed when Meyer took off running. Noel brought him down in a tackle and they wrestled viciously but companionably, growing ever muddier, until Hailey appeared to summon them inside.
Noel felt much better for the exercise.
9
THE DAY AFTER CRISPIN LEFT FOR FRANCE, LUCILLA boarded a train for London. Though she and Clara Lockie had once been close, she had not seen her in three years, since before Clara’s employment with the Red Cross. However, the wire she’d sent had been answered with all the gleeful enthusiasm typical of her friend. Remembering the teas they’d shared as undergraduates, she’d packed tins of ginger biscuits and Bovril in the bottom of her carpetbag, along with a couple of the romantic novels Clara had always loved to mock.
She successfully maneuvered the chaos of Victoria Station, though she was shocked to notice how many of the passengers were men in khaki uniforms, or in civilian clothing and carrying military haversacks. It was one thing to know there was a war, and quite another to see the evidence in such a familiar environment. On the streets, she passed a line of men outside a recruitment office, and a small but vigorous demonstration against becoming involved in the affairs of Europe. She caught herself stopping at the end of the block and glancing back at the extraordinarily handsome man who led the demonstrators; he didn’t wear a hat, and his strong features and leonine gray-streaked hair made him look like a king in a portrait. Though he would likely be horrified to know it. Lucilla looked away, and her gaze collided with a man in a dark City suit, who touched his hat brim and smiled at her with a bit more warmth than she would normally have expected. She pretended she hadn’t seen, and hurried on her way. Where had all these men come from? Or was it that her recent experiences had opened her eyes?
Clara worked in an office building overrun by men in dark suits and bowler hats. Lucilla took the lift up to the appropriate floor and was impressed to find that she had a room to herself, overlooking a street crammed with vendors of flowers and fruit. Cl
ara rose to greet her, enfolding her in an enthusiastic embrace and kissing both her cheeks. “You are a godsend!” she exclaimed. “Have a seat. Would you like some tea? I have fresh in the pot.”
Once her gifts to Clara were laughed over, and Lucilla settled in an old armchair, teacup in hand, she said, “Why am I a godsend? Surely you’re not lacking for volunteers.”
“My dear, it’s not a volunteer that’s wanted here. Tell me, you’re still working with the surgery cases, aren’t you?” She referred to a sheet of notepaper on her battered desk. “You’ve worked with abdominal surgeries?”
“Yes,” Lucilla said. “It pays the best, frankly. Are you saying that this is a paying position?”
Clara beamed. “Yes! You see, there is to be a women’s hospital in France.”
“For women?”
“No, no. Staffed by women. Run by women. Women doctors! Only, of the ones we have, they haven’t had much experience with the sorts of wounds one encounters in war. Miss Fitzclarence qualified in obstetrics, and Miss Rivers in osteopathic surgery, so that’s a bit better. Miss Gould is to be chief of anesthesiology, and she’s quite experienced. But they’re in want of a surgical nurse, someone experienced who’s willing to work with women and teach them, as well. That’s why your wire made me dance, Lucilla, dance about my tiny room here, and then immediately dash off a reply to you.”
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